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ArtPlace America encourages a ‘partnership’

Community development needs art, says speaker

By JOE SUTTER

jsutter@messengernews.net

Community development often involves discussions of transportation, economics, education or infrastructure. But what is the role of art?

Javier Torres brought that question on behalf of ArtPlace America to Fort Dodge Wednesday afternoon.

About 40 artists, community development workers, city planners and museum volunteers from around the region gathered to learn more about what Torres called “creative placemaking,” and the funds ArtPlace can provide to encourage that.

“We define creative placemaking as projects that are focused on community planning and development,” Torres said, “and that leverage or deploy arts and culture to create place-based change.”

ArtPlace doesn’t fund arts projects, or more access to arts, he said. Instead, it seeks out groups that want to use art to accomplish something in a community development sector.

“We are not funding an expansion of your arts and culture programs in any way. We are deploying arts and culture for a transportation outcome, or a workforce outcome, or an economic development outcome,” he said.

ArtPlace is a collaboration among a number of foundations, federal agencies, and financial institutions. It was founded in 2011 and will disband in 2020.

Foundations backing ArtPlace include the Mellon, Ford and Rockefeller foundations.

In one example of the types of projects ArtPlace funds, the group helped an artist in small-town Massachusetts, where a closed dye factory had left dye polluting the ground.

The artist arranged for colored streetlights throughout the city that corresponded to the colors that had seeped into the ground there, and got the community to come together to address the problem.

“It motivated individuals to decide they wanted to engage more with the land,” said Torres. “These individuals had experienced a lot of pain, frustration, anger about what had happened there — so much so that people couldn’t agree on how to deal with it, how to move forward. So Dan’s goal here was about getting people to process all that emotional baggage and beginning to see possibility.”

Torres’ talk sparked a lot of interest.

“It’s encouraging,” said Deb Brown, with the Webster City Area Chamber of Commerce. Brown said she could think of a number of projects that would be eligible.

“Legacy Learning Boone River Valley — they’re one of our chamber members. The work they do is, they marry art and nature to create adult continuing education programs,” Brown said. “They’re doing some fun things around teaching people how to fix buildings, for example.”

The center teaches heritage crafts, pine needle baskets, oil and acrylic painting, and photography, as well as nature things like owl walks, said Sharon Cline, Boone River Valley board member.

And funding through ArtPlace is generous. Torres said the average grant given out by ArtPlace is around $50,000 to $500,000.

“The amounts are pretty high, if you’re used to working with $10,000, $20,000 grant requests,” Brown said.

“We’re so used to scrapping for bits of money, this is a paradigm shift for us,” Cline said.

“This meeting I think has got people dreaming big,” Brown added.

But that money doesn’t come easily. The group receives about 1,500 applications every year, Torres said, and only funds about 25 to 30 projects.

Projects in rural Iowa do have a slight advantage, he said, because 50 percent of the foundation’s funding is geographically restricted. Rural Iowa projects are eligible for funding from both restricted and unrestricted sources.

Kiley Miller asked how arts might be able to address one of the challenges facing northwest Iowa — the attrition of young people.

“How do you leverage the arts to create a sense of ownership of the local region, to retain young people in the area?” Miller asked.

Torres drew parallels between that question and a project ArtPlace once funded in Hawaii. There, a young woman used film and media to help encourage conservation of ag land that looked like it was going to be sold for housing development.

“There is something about storytelling that happens through video and through photo, that actually moves individuals and conveys knowledge,” Torres said.

Miller works for the Iowa Lakes Corridor Development Corporation, in Spencer.

“I think it’s exciting that there’s a push to make people realize arts and culture are a critical part of community health, as opposed to something that comes at the end, after transportation and housing, what we’ve traditionally thought of as the core needs,” Miller said. “Plus, they’re the greatest communication vehicle. People respond to stories.”

The night was hosted by the Fort Dodge Fine Arts Association.

“We were pleased to be able to host this workshop, because of the potential impact it could have in the community,” said Fort Dodge Community Foundation and United Way Chief Executive Officer Randy Kuhlman. “It’s an organization that is very flexible,and has a significant amount of money they want to invest in communities to have an impact, using a wide range of creative art opportunities.”

That flexibility is rare, Kuhlman said.

“Usually they come in and they’re really narrow. They say, ‘this is what we’re looking for.’ And he made it very clear he didn’t want any boundaries put on ideas and thoughts, and ways that communities, projects can make a difference in their communities.”

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